University Converges Media Production on EditShare

Oregon State University in the US is running a new tapeless workflow storage system to support media production and sharing across its Media Services, Intercollegiate Athletics, Student Media, and Outreach and Engagement departments. The installation is based on a tiered storage platform made up of 200TB of EditShare shared storage with a 160-slot Ark LTO tape library for integrated archive and backup.

Several Geevs Broadcastservers with tools for managing multi-camera and newsroom workflows will work behind diverse types of ingest and playout. EditShare’s Flow media asset management will serve as the installation’s control layer, which has tools to manage media from ingest to archive. Acting as an intermediary, mezzanine service across campus, Flow includes automation and cloud-based production functions that organize content to make it quickly accessible.

“Although each department is independent, they regularly need to share assets,” said Rick Brand, Associate Director for Technical Services at OSU Academic Technology department. “The existing setup made it very difficult to locate and share media. Outreach and Engagement had been carrying drives between locations, the Student Media department was still on analog devices, and Athletics was on a shared platform that was at its capacity and near end of life.

“We had no centralised repository or mechanism for transcoding and making media usable. The fact that the students are always in transition, taking some of the media with them as they move, made the system more complex. EditShare establishes campus-wide standardisation and makes it easier to take advantage of all content, whether it was captured five days ago or five years ago. Tasks like media migration and transcoding will become transparent to the user.”

The EditShare installation, which will be housed in a new building at the university, the Student Experience Centre, allows access and file sharing to students and staff from any desktop or laptop system that is connected to the Internet. It also has tools to capture, edit and distribute the content for their in-house newsroom, studio and athletic productions and online video courses.

EditShare’s ability to support multiple workflows works well for OSU because the staff run several different media workflows and skillsets in each of the departments that will use and access the system. Each department’s operations converge on the EditShare, which drives all production and post-production media management.

The system will be the central hub of production for activities such as newsroom production and playout, and working with outside organisations like sports broadcasters who may request backgrounder footage on OSU teams. Because EditShare is designed for collaboration, it integrates with other common broadcast components, like the university’s Ross automation system and most non-linear standard editing applications including Avid, Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro and EditShare Lightworks. www.editshare.com